


life slips in

by thisisthefamilybusiness



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alpha Reaper | Gabriel Reyes, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Angst, Canon Disabled Character, Canonical Character Death, I am so serious about that angst tag y'all, I have nothing but sadness to offer you here, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mpreg, Omega Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison, Parent-Child Relationship, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, So Serious, Unhealthy Relationships, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-30
Updated: 2017-04-30
Packaged: 2018-10-25 13:45:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10765449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisisthefamilybusiness/pseuds/thisisthefamilybusiness
Summary: It was supposed to be different.Maybe that was what hurt the most—just knowing how different things were supposed to be. He never thought he'd miss Indiana, that small town and clapboard farmhouse—but Jack hadn't imagined anywhere safer or better for their family to be, far away from danger, tucked away in farmland, where the nearest city was at least an hour away. Where nobody could get to them.Life slips in when Jack isn't looking and carves out a new person, and he has to deal with the consequences.





	life slips in

 It was supposed to be _different_.

Maybe that was what hurt the most—just knowing how _different_ things were supposed to be. He never thought he'd miss Indiana, that small town and clapboard farmhouse—but Jack hadn't imagined anywhere safer or better for their family to be, far away from danger, tucked away in farmland, where the nearest city was at least an hour away. Where nobody could get to them.

But the baby is gone before Jack can vocalize this, can tell them that he loves them and that's why he's sending them away—whisked away by Ziegler or one of the nurses, he doesn't know, he can't see without the visor. Jack asked not to know the sex, he asked not to know the name the new parents gave them. He thought it would make it easier.

He wants to know, though—he wants his baby back in his arms, to kiss their forehead and tell them how much he loves them, tell them the beautiful plans that he'd had for them before the entire world went to shit. Jack wants to know their sex and their name, their exact time of birth, whether the baby looks more like himself or like _him_ , how much the baby weighed and how long they were. Fuck. He wants so much.

But the baby's out of the room, and it's too late for Jack to take back the painstakingly worked contracts he arranged. That isn't his baby anymore, it's some other family's.

* * *

The first few days are the hardest. Ziegler warned him, told him that his body would have problems adjusting—it would keep anticipating a newborn that never appeared, chest sore and his scars, both old and new, aching. He woke up at odd hours of the night, certain he'd heard a baby crying, even though his baby was thousands and thousands of miles away. He wasn't hungry, and anything beyond plain crackers and peanut butter made him sick.

Ziegler gives him anti-nausea tablets, sleeping pills, a heating pad for his chest. She never looks him in the eye, just nodded when he listed his symptoms and plucked bottles and boxes out of the clinic storeroom.

"You don't have to talk to me, Jack, but you should talk to someone," Ziegler murmurs, stuffing her hands in her pockets, still staring somewhere over Jack's head. "It can't be easy."

Jack wants to scream. Of course it wasn't easy. Jack had never even gotten a look at his baby, at the last piece of _him_ that he'd had. Fuck, he didn't even know the sex of the baby he'd carried for nine months, he didn't even get a say in their name (Jack had found that baby name book two days ago, a gift that never got given for a day that never came, a few pages dog-eared with suggestions, and just laid down for a few hours afterwards, trying not to think about _him_ ).

And who was he supposed to talk to? He was dead to all of his old friends except for Ziegler herself. That had been the point of working with her, keeping his survival a secret.

Ziegler must know what Jack's thinking about, because she shakes her head. "Somebody professional, Jack. I am a surgeon, I am a scientist—but I am not a psychiatrist."

"Sure you wouldn't mind another five, six years of med school?" Jack scrubs a hand over his face, jostling his visor.

Ziegler smiles, but she looks so tired, so much older than she is. "Jack. I won't—I can't make you go see someone. But if you want, I can arrange something, I have colleagues and friends who won't say a thing—"

"I'll be fine, Dr. Ziegler." Jack cuts her off. "I survived a building-leveling explosion. I can survive this."

 _An explosion that killed your fiancé_ , Jack knows Ziegler wants to say. _An explosion that killed the father of your child. An explosion that left you scarred and blind and literally dead to the world, because I signed off on your death certificate to get you off the hook._

An explosion that left an empty casket for Jack Morrison to be buried next to the remains they'd identified conclusively as Gabriel Reyes, both with full military honors.

Jack shrugs the thought off and shoves the pills and heating pad into his bag.

Ziegler doesn't bother trying to continue the conversation.

* * *

 Jack remembers the day he found out.

Things hadn't been going great, or even okay. Calling what they'd been doing "fighting" or "arguing" seemed to downplay the outright violence of it, how often they ended up so explosively angry nothing could contain it.

They'd talked about children, before things had started to go to shit. Back when Gabriel had proposed to him, promised that "stupid work shit" like Jack's promotion would never get in the way of their relationship, said he'd like to make an honest omega out of Jack, be a family. They'd promised they'd retire in five years (except that five years became six, and would have become seven and eight and so on, had it not been for the machinations of whatever it was that had destroyed Overwatch), go back to Jack's tiny hometown in Indiana, have a baby. Have two babies, or three—happy and healthy, like a real family.

But the baby had been an accident. Things—Overwatch, their relationship, pressure from the UN—hadn't been good for a while. Months, even. Jack had been on birth control, but between whatever it was the SEP had done to him and the stress of their lives, his cycles had always been irregular. They had been careful, but in those last few weeks, everything had become so chaotic, and it hadn’t been something they’d been as dutiful about as they should have. Jack had just assumed it would all be fine; the SEP had always told him he was almost certainly sterile, and Ziegler had always agreed with them on that.

Jack didn’t even know until days after he woke up in the rubble of what was once their headquarters, vision gone except for pinpricks of gray on a black horizon, dragging himself off into the woods that surrounded the base on his hands and knees. Ziegler had found him there, where he’d laid in the grass between the trees to die, and took him back—not to the emergency medical tents she’d been assigned to work with the UN response team, but to her makeshift quarters. How she got away with it, Jack had no idea; those days immediately after the explosion were all a blur.

She waited until he’d settled into her new apartment in Bern, still bedridden and adjusting to being blind, to tell him. She told him everything: that despite Gabriel’s abilities, they’d found (most) of his body, charred and pinned under a chunk of what used to be his office ceiling; that Jack Morrison was legally dead to the world because she knew whatever happened next, the scrutiny of the entire world wasn’t something Jack should have to bear. That he, against all odds, was pregnant, and the embryo was healthy, a real fighter.

Ziegler had been good to him. Jack might never understand why, because in the aftermath of the explosion he’d been a real grade-A asshole to her. He’d screamed and all but destroyed her apartment, thrown things. Jack had torn the stitches she’d so carefully placed in his face. But she was always so calm, so composed, even in the face of his anger. Even in the face of his sadness, when he finally collapsed to her floor and sobbed, when he told her he was so tired of trying to think that things would get better from here on out—she held him and told him that she’d do what she could.

She’d brought him the visor—a prototype from some military tech contractor’s lab, the exact origins of which Jack could never get her to tell him beyond that she’d called in quite a few favors. Everything was tinted red, and it felt heavy resting on his face, but he could see. She’d brought in an obstetrician friend of hers to see him on yet another favor.

It wouldn’t be easy—he was older, god knows what the SEP had done to his hormones, he had survived an explosion that should have killed him and a traumatic injury while pregnant—but ultimately Ziegler and her obstetrician buddy had resolved that he would be fine to carry to term, if he wanted to.

The idea of ending the pregnancy didn't even register in Jack's mind. He knew it was selfish, that no child should have to be raised by a dead man in whatever safehouse he and Ziegler could scrounge up, living on the move because Jack couldn’t hide in Ziegler’s apartment forever and people would eventually wonder about that blind man they saw who bore some odd resemblance to the partially-destroyed statue in front of the rubble that used to be Overwatch HQ.

It took him a bit—right around when he started showing, when his body no longer let him deny what was happening—to decide what to do.

He couldn’t terminate the pregnancy. He couldn’t keep the baby. But he could find a nice, safe family somewhere, and trust his baby to them. Give it a shot at some semblance of a normal life, or at least as normal of a life as anyone could get these days.

* * *

It takes Jack five months before he finally asks Ziegler about the baby.

She’s patching him up after his latest fight went south—a group of generic troublemakers that had been spotted looting the ruins of HQ, but Jack wanted to be sure it wasn’t Talon trying to find anything in the rubble. It ended up in a ten-versus-one match, and no amount of _enhancement_ could make that an even fight, especially because Jack was working with vanilla guns.

“What was the sex?” Jack mumbles, glad the visor was off so he didn’t have to see Ziegler’s expression.

Ziegler doesn’t reply right away, daubing a gash on his forehead gently with an alcohol wipe.

“Goddammit, Angela.” He makes sure to pronounce her name the American way, with a soft drawl, just to annoy her. “What was the sex of my baby?” She swipes harder than necessary, the alcohol stinging the wound. Jack cringes.

“You asked not to know.” Ziegler tosses the wipe into the trash. Jack hears the rustling of a drawer opening, plastic bandage packaging being pulled open. The UN had seized her Valkyrie suit and staff, all of her tech—it had, after all, belonged to Overwatch, and now that Overwatch was done for, Ziegler was back the same medical supplies any other doctor could get.  

“And I’m asking to know now.”

The waterproof bandage is gently smoothed over his forehead. “Have you talked to someone?”

“I’m fine, dammit, just tell me—”

“Don’t lie to me, Jack. I have colleagues that would help you, no questions asked.” Ziegler pulls another alcohol wipe out and starts swiping at another cut, this one along his neck. There’s a moment of silence, where Ziegler just quietly does her work and Jack stews in his own mind.

“If I see someone, will you tell me?” Jack sighs.

He can’t see it, but he knows that Ziegler is smiling, can almost smell it in her alpha hormones. “Of course.”

* * *

Ziegler’s friend is not what Jack was anticipating.

It’s a weapons dealer.

How or why Ziegler—of all people, Angela “pacifist, avoid-violence-at-all-costs, callsign given as Mercy for a reason” Ziegler—knew a damned weapons dealer, Jack has no fucking clue. It explains where the visor came from, though.

In the case the dealer brings is a pulse rifle. _Jack’s_ pulse rifle. The one that was left in HQ and reclaimed by the UN. It’s seen better days, damaged and dented, but it’s his.

Ziegler pays for it herself. Jack lost all his money when his death certificate had been signed, but Ziegler assures him that he can repay her, easily, if he just goes to see _another_ friend of hers.

(He had a healthy baby boy, a son.)

This friend actually was a doctor. A psychiatrist, to be exact, a pretty young woman with soft brown hair and matching eyes that clearly has never seen a battlefield before. She runs through breathing exercises and meditations, tells him it wasn’t his fault, that he could never control someone else’s actions—all the right things a doctor should say.

(The baby was nine pounds, five ounces, and had a full head of soft dark curls, newborn-blue eyes that Jack wonders if he’s kept, or if he’s outgrown them. Any effects of the SEP on the baby weren’t apparent, but then again, they’d have to wait until he could walk to see if he was unusually fast or agile.)

The psychiatrist doesn’t do much for the nightmares, but they’ve become less about the explosion and more about his baby. It always starts the same: the little farmhouse in Indiana he grew up in, his baby sleeping in the same crib that he’d slept in. He’s watching his son rest. And then there comes the shadow—a nebulous darkness that vaguely takes on a human shape, and always speaks to Jack in _his_ voice, in _Gabriel’s_ voice. It’s Jack’s fault that Gabriel died, it hisses at him. Blindness and temporary deafness be damned, Jack pulled himself out of that rubble and he could have found Gabriel, too. What kind of omega was Jack to just abandon his mate like that? To leave Gabriel to _die_? The baby screams in the background and Jack is too crippled by his own terror and guilt to move.

Those nightmares haunt Jack the worst, somehow more terrible than reliving the blast every single night. He doesn’t tell the psychiatrist that. Ziegler would be angry about that, probably. But those nightmares are also all he has of Gabriel any more.

* * *

His baby would be three years old now. Jack gulps down his glass of bourbon and winces, waves the omnic bartender down and gestures for a refill. Born at 8:39 PM, and the clock hidden along the collection of flashing neon signs on the bar wall reads 8:41. Officially three years old. At least, Jack thinks, this time he’s in the same country as his baby for his birthday. D.C. might be five hundred-odd miles from the Midwest, but it was the closest Jack had been to him since the day he was born.

The omnic pours him a generous fresh glass of bourbon, which is gone about as quickly as Jack can swallow it down. It takes more than a few glasses of even hard liquor to get Jack anywhere near drunk nowadays.

There’s a woman sitting alone at the opposite end of the bar, tucked away in the shadows. There’s something vaguely familiar about her that Jack can’t quite place, which might have more to do with the low image quality of this new casual visor Angela engineered than her actually being somebody Jack recognizes—the concealability of the visor meant a compromise in the quality of vision, apparently. Jack drops a ten on the counter and slides off his stool, headed—ostensibly—to the bathroom in the back of the bar.

But other than some intensely caked-on makeup (which Jack wasn’t one to criticize about, his own damage currently hidden behind layers of scar wax and foundation), the woman is nothing out of the ordinary. Jack shrugs the itching sense of _wrongness_ off and opens the door to the bathroom.

* * *

The stones at Arlington are right next to each other. Jack G. Morrison, Strike-Commander, Overwatch, US Army, First Omnic Crisis. Gabriel A. Reyes, Major, Overwatch, US Army, First Omnic Crisis. Dates of birth and death. Little engraved crosses above both of their names.

Jack gently propped the photo up on Gabriel’s headstone. A healthy little boy with curly black hair and a bright toothy smile and soft brown eyes, in a little Captain America costume from Halloween. Gabriel would have gotten a kick out of that, Jack thinks, always loved calling him Captain America, the country’s golden boy. The leather of his pants squeaks as he kneels in the wet grass.

Angela checked on the kid three times a year, played at being a visiting specialist from Europe who oversaw monitoring pediatric wards at hospitals across the world, or some bullshit that the adoptive parents somehow believed. The photo had been a gift to Angela from one of the parents, framed by hot-glued popsicle sticks doodled on in washable marker and decorated with glittery superhero stickers.

“He’s a good kid, Gabe,” Jack sighs, closing his eyes for a minute. “Fuck. He’s happy. Isn’t that what we should want for him?”

But it wasn’t. Jack wants that farmhouse in Indiana, that small town and a kid running around barefoot in the yard chasing after a dog. Wants to bake fucking blueberry pies and kiss his son’s scraped knees all better and never think about goddamned Overwatch ever again. Wants to play house with Gabriel like they were kids just pretending at being grown-up alpha and omega.

Wants to call Angela and force her to tell him where his baby is now, even though it hasn’t worked the past two-dozen times. Even though it would put a giant target on the child’s back. Even though it would ruin the very purpose of keeping his son so far away, of protecting him and giving him a chance at a real life, an actual childhood.

Jack reaches behind his head and tugs the visor free, eyes stinging. Fuck. This was a mistake. If he’d been stronger back then, if he’d seen the dozen-plus red flags that should have gone off—if he’d only trusted Gabriel, if he’d stopped trying to be the fucking hero so goddamned much, he wouldn’t be stuck in this fucking graveyard, blind and surrounded by the graves of his best friends. If he’d listened to Gabriel and pulled his head out of his own ass, instead of trying to be a one-man solution to the problems of the entire world—fuck. If he’d been a little stronger, if he hadn’t been so fucking focused on his new lack of sight after the explosion and could’ve found Gabriel in the rubble…

Jack steels himself, clenching his fists so tightly that he can feel the moon-shapes of his fingernails digging into his palm through his gloves. He inhales and exhales, just like the psychiatrist always tells him.

He slides the visor on, picks up his pulse rifle from where he’d propped it against the headstone of Jack G. Morrison.

He never even notices the shadow slowly coalescing itself into a physical form on Gabriel’s grave.

**Author's Note:**

> me: I can enjoy this fandom without having to write fanfiction for it  
> me, two days and over 3k words later: ha haha h a
> 
> (sorry abt all the mercy that ended up in this fic lmao)
> 
> play Overwatch w/ me at clstarling#1290, if you want, or catch me on Discord at claricestarling#4370  
> come stare at my mess of a blog at [tumblr](http://officialclaricestarling.tumblr.com/)


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